A Quiet Place is about a family of five and growing in the middle of a brutal alien invasion with no intelligence, just hungry monsters. If you make a sound, you die. With three children and one on the way, making noise is inevitable. The main question for the family becomes who is going to mess up and die first. The family has one advantage over others, which you will discover fairly early in the film. I think that the hype is disproportionate to the actual quality of the film, but it is a fun diversion that ultimately delivers. The movie shows rather than tells the back story and has a solid ending that saves all the earlier contrivances that push the story forward, but strain credibility.
I like Emily Blunt and sci fi/horror films so A Quiet Place had my money after I saw the trailers. After Eyes Wide Shut, I flinch at the idea of real life spouses starring in films together for all to gaze upon their awkwardness and marital problems, but I figured that Blunt was a good enough actor to carry her husband, whose lead acting tool has been his hair. Blunt and Krasinski make a good acting team. If I had known that he directed the film, it may have dimmed my enthusiasm a smidge, but was not enough to stop me from going to the theaters.
A Quiet Place is The Office’s John Krasinski’s third cinematic directorial film, and he finally succeeds. I didn’t see his first film, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, though I like Julianne Nicholson, but I did see The Hollars, which was utterly disappointing in the way that it depicted financial crisis and gender. These flaws are still evident in this film, but horror is a more forgiving genre than drama. If women and girls are always capable, strong and ready in horror than the men and boys who flounder in fear even when they succeed, that enhances the experience whereas in drama, it diminishes it. In one genre, it is subversive and triumphant, but in another, it is two-dimensional.
A Quiet Place owes a debt of gratitude to Guillermo del Toro, the Alien franchise, Lord of the Rings, The Mist (the movie, not the TV series), the Cloverfield franchise, which it could have been a part of, and Signs. The underlying emotional trajectory of the narrative for the family is clearly inspired by Signs. There is the idea of how a tragedy forever alters a family dynamic and stifles emotion without explicit grandiose ideas of faith and fate though there is Biblical imagery (Revelation 12:18) and the theme of a loving father. I think that it could have been a great movie, but there were too many moments that though plausible if given a lot of thought, are initially ridiculous and briefly took me out of the story.
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Jump scares are cheap. Toys don’t come with batteries. Fine, it was the floor model. So he got the toy, but still had the nerve to take the batteries anyway AND put them in correctly without anyone noticing. Suicide &/or dumb kid move? Day 473 was the most eventful day ever. No, you couldn’t carry your son, and you shouldn’t have tried to carry two wet bags of laundry so the nail of plot contrivance would not suddenly appear. Hope that you had your tetanus shots. How are there still little glass vases of flowers everywhere? They would get knocked over in seconds in my house without an alien apocalypse. That was the quickest labor ever. You can’t wait until I’m clear to scream your head off? The pipe burst ploy has Moses calling and demanding his plotline back. Handing over the baby to the one child that is clearly the least courageous and clever in the family is either the dumbest or the most ruthless move because since the baby will probably cry and die, two birds, one stone, and you don’t lose someone who could probably survive. Sometimes the corn is quick sand, and sometimes it is not. Side note: drowning in a silo is actually a thing and awful. Can’t too much oxygen cause physical damage?
Despite all my quibbling, I actually enjoyed A Quiet Place. Any movie or TV show that is willing to kill a child and keep it real deserves kudos. I would have preferred if there were no soundtrack so the silence could dominate even further. It totally exploited my longstanding fear of kerosene lamps. My audience sucked. Someone’s cell phone rang. A group of young people probably snuck into the theater midway and missed the memo that sneaking should be quiet, not be accompanied by muffled giggles.
I would love to read a critique of the film by hearing impaired movie critics. While there is an issue with the daughter feeling as if her father resents her for the death of the youngest child, there is an additional underlying communication tension, which reminded me of the Deaf rights movement. Some strongly oppose cochlear implants whereas others feel that such implants are necessary because there is a gap in socialization. She doesn’t want to be fixed because she doesn’t believe that he can do it and is tired of pretending that he can. He is desperate to restore her ability to hear noise in order to survive, but it results in him inadvertently making her feel left out by excluding her from bonding with him (his wife shares a song on headphones, and he shares the ability to talk freely near a river with his son) because it is his primary way of communicating and showing love. This frustrated me because they already have the ability to communicate through American Sign Language, but it isn’t his instinctual mode of communication so it damages the relationship. In the end, his devotion and efforts become the source of the family’s salvation, and her disability becomes her strength. Also clearly mom is the ancestor of Rita from Edge of Tomorrow.
As for me and my house, we would have died before A Quiet Place even started within the first few minutes of the alien apocalypse. Even if it wasn’t death by noise, I would not be able to hit the ground running by preserving and canning food. I need civilization.